美国国务卿克里在耶鲁大学毕业活动日上英语演讲稿.docx

美国国务卿克里在耶鲁大学毕业活动日上英语演讲稿Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I think Winston Churchill said the only reason people give a standing ovation is they desperately seek an excuse to shift their underwear. (Laughter.) So certainly before Ive opened my mouth, thats true. (Laughter.)Anyway, President Salovey and faculty members, parents, siblings who came here under thefalse impression there would be free food (laughter); Handsome Dan, wherever you are,probably at some fire hydrant somewhere (laughter); members of the 2023 NCAA championmens ice hockey team (cheers and applause); distinguished guests and graduates,graduates of the Class of 2023, I really am privileged to be able to be here and share thecelebration of this day with you, especially 48 years after standing up right here as a veryintimidated senior wondering what I was going to say.You are graduating today as the most diverse class in Yales long history. Or as they call it inthe NBA, Donald Sterlings worst nightmare. (Laughter and applause.)Nia and Josh: Thank you for such a generous introduction. What Josh didnt mention is that heinterned for me at the State Department last summer. (Cheers and applause.) Well, hold on aminute now. (Laughter.) I learned that hes not afraid to talk truth to power, or semi-truth. (Laughter.) On his last day he walked up to me at the State Department and he was brutallyhonest. He said, “Mr. Secretary, JE sucks.” (Laughter and cheers.)No, actually, on the last day at the State Department, he asked if I would come here today anddeliver a message his classmates really needed to hear. So here it goes: Jarred Phillips, you stillowe Josh money from that road trip last fall. (Laughter and applause.)I have to tell you, it is really fun for me to be back here on the Old Campus. Im accompaniedby a classmate of mine. We were on the soccer team together. We had a lot of fun. He served asambassador to Italy recently, David Thorne. And my daughter Vanessa graduated in the Classof 1999, so I know what a proud moment this is for your parents. But my friends, the test willbe if they still feel this way next May if you live at home. (Laughter.)Now, Im really happy you made it back from Myrtle Beach. (Cheers and applause.) As if youhadnt already logged enough keg time at “Woads”. (Cheers.) Just remember, just remember: 4.0 is a really good GPA, but its a lousy blood-alcohol level. (Laughter.)I love the hats. We didnt have the hats when I was here. I love the hats. They are outrageous.Theyre spectacular. This may well be the only event that Pharrell could crash and gounnoticed. (Laughter and applause.)Ive been looking around. Ive seen a couple of Red Sox, a few Red Sox hats out there. (Cheers.)Ive also seen a few of those dreaded interlocking Ns and Ys. (Cheers.) But thats okay: I saiddiversity is important. (Laughter.) Its also an easy way for me to tell who roots for theYankees and whos graduating with distinction. (Laughter and cheers.)So heres the deal, heres the deal: I went online and I learned in the Yale Daily comments thatI wasnt everyones first choice to be up here. (Laughter.)When Yale announced that Id be speaking, someone actually wrote, “I hope they give outFive-Hour Energy to help everyone stay awake.” (Laughter.) Well dont worry folks: I promisenot to be one minute over four hours. (Laughter.)Someone else wrote I havent “screwed up badly as Secretary of State . yet.” (Laughter.)Well, all I can say is, stay tuned. (Laughter.)But my favorite comment was this: “Im really proud that a Yalie is Secretary of State.” Ishould have stopped reading right there because he or she went on to write, “but he is buttugly.” (Laughter.) So there go my dreams of being on “Yales 50 most beautiful” list. (Cheersand applause.)It really is a privilege for me to share this celebration with you, though Im forewarned that noone remembers who delivers their graduation speech. All I really remember about our speakerin 1966 is that he was eloquent, insightful, really good looking. (Laughter.) Anyway, onething I promise you, one thing I promise you: I will stay away from the tired cliches ofcommencement, things like “be yourself,” “do what makes you happy,” “dont use the laundryroom in Saybrook”. (Cheers and applause.) Thats about all Ill say about that. (Laughter.)So right after we graduated, Time Magazine came out with its famous “Man of the Year” issue.But for 1966, Timedidnt pick one man or one woman. They picked our entire generation.And Time expressed a lot of high hopes for us. It not only predicted that wed cure thecommon cold, but that wed cure cancer, too. It predicted that wed build smog-free cities andthat wed end poverty and war once and for all. I know what youre thinking we reallycrushed it. (Laughter.)So fair question: Did my generation get lost? Well, thats actually a conversation for anothertime. But let me put one theory to rest: Its not true that everyone in my generationexperimented with drugs. Although between Flomax, Lipitor and Viagra, now we do. (Laughterand applause.)Now, I did have some pretty creative classmates back then. One of my good friends, very closefriends in JE (cheers) Im going to set it right for you guys right now. (Laughter.) One of mygood friends in JE had at least two hair-brained ideas. The first was a little start-up built on thenotion that if people had a choice, theyd pay a little more to mail a package and have it arrivethe very next day. Crazy, right? Today that start-up is called FedEx. And by the way, it wascreated in JE, which therefore means JE rules. (Cheers and applause.)Now, his other nutty idea was to restart something called the Yale Flying Club. And admittedly,this was more of a scheme to get us out of class and off the campus. So I basically spent mysenior year majoring in flying, practicing take-offs and landings out at Tweed Airport.Responsible? No. But I wouldnt have missed it.And one of the best lessons I learned here is that Mark Twain was absolutely right: Never letschool get in the way of an education.Now, I didnt know it at the time, but Yale also taught me to finish what you start. And thatsone thing that clearly separates us from Harvard. (Laughter.) After all, a lot of those guys donteven graduate. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Matt Damon what the hell have they everamounted to? (Laughter.)For all I ever learned at Yale, I have to tell you truthfully the best piece of advice I ever got wasactually one word from my 89-year-old mother. Ill never forget sitting by her bedside andtelling her I had decided to run for President. And she squeezed my hand and she said: “Integrity, John. Integrity. Just remember always, integrity.” And maybe that tells you a lotabout what she thought about politics.But you should know: In a complicated world full of complicated decisions and close calls thatcould go either way, what keeps you awake at night isnt so much whether or not you got thedecision right or wrong. Its whether you made your decision for the right reasons: Integrity.And the single best piece of advice I ever received about diplomacy didnt come from myinternational relations class, but it came from my father, who served in the Foreign Service. Hetold me that diplomacy was really about being able to see the world through the eyes ofsomeone else, to understand their aspirations and assumptions.And perhaps thats just another word for empathy. But whatever it is, I will tell you sittinghere on one of the most gorgeous afternoons in New Haven as you graduate: Listening makes adifference, not just in foreign ministries but on the streets and in the souks and on the socialmedia network the world over.So Class of 2023, as corny as it may sound, remember that your parents arent just here todayas spectators. Theyre also here as teachers and even if counter-intuitive, its not a badidea to stay enrolled in their course as long as you can.Now for my part, I am grateful to Yale because I did learn a lot here in all of the ways that agreat university can teach. But there is one phrase from one class above all that for somereason was indelibly stamped into my consciousness. Perhaps its because I spent almost 30years in the United States Senate seeing it applied again and again.One morning in the Law School Auditorium, my Professor, John Morton Blum, said simply: “Allpolitics is a reaction to felt needs.” What I thought he meant is that things only get done inpublic life when the people who want something demand nothing less and the people who makeit happen decide tht they can do nothing less.Those “felt needs” have driven every movement and decision that Ive witnessed in politicssince from South Africa a couple of decades ago to the Arab Spring a few years ago to ourown communities, where same-sex couples refuse to be told by their government who they canlove.In 1963, I remember walking out of Dwight Hall one evening after an activist named AllardLowenstein gave the impassioned and eloquent plea that I had ever heard. He compelled usto feel the need to engage in the struggle for civil rights right here in our own country.And thats why, just steps from here, right over there on High Street, we lined up buses thatdrove students from Yale and elsewhere south to be part of the Mississippi Voter RegistrationDrive and help break the back of Jim Crow. Ultimately we forced Washington to ensure throughthe law that our values were not mere words. We saw Congress respond to this “felt need” andpass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and life in America did change.Not only did landmark civil rights advances grow out of the sit-ins and marches, but we sawthe EPA and the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act and allof it come out of Earth Day in 1970. We saw women refusing to take a back-seat, forceinstitutions to respond, producing Title IX and a Yale University that quickly transformedfrom a male bastion of 1966. Citizens, including veterans of the war, spoke up and brought ourtroops home from Vietnam.The fact is that what leaps out at me now is the contrast between those heady days and today.Right or wrong, and like it or not and certainly some people certainly didnt like it back theninstitutions were hard pressed to avoid addressing the felt needs of our country.Indeed, none of what Ive talked about happened overnight. The pace of change was differentfrom today. The same fall that my class walked in as freshmen, Nelson Mandela walked intoprison. It wasnt until 30 years later, when my daughter walked through these gates for thefirst time, that Mandela was his countrys president.When I was a senior, the debate over the growing war in Vietnam was becoming allconsuming. But it took another seven years before combat ended for our country, and morethan 25,000 lives. And it wasnt until the year 2023 that we finally made peace and normalizedrelations. Now, amazingly, we have more Vietnamese studying in America including some inyour class than from almost any other country in the world.Whats notable is this daring journey of progress played out over years, decades, and evengenerations. But today, the felt needs are growing at a faster pace than ever before, piling upon top of each other, while the response in legislatures or foreign capitals seems nonexistentor frozen.Its not that the needs arent felt. Its that people around the world seem to have grown used toseeing systems or institutions failing to respond. And the result is an obvious deepeningfrustration if not exasperation with institutional governance.The problem is todays institutions are simply not keeping up or even catching up to the feltneeds of our time. Right before our eyes, difficult decisions are deferred or avoided altogether.Some people even give up before they try because they just dont believe that they can make adifference. And the sum total of all of this inaction is stealing the future from all of us.Just a few examples, from little to big: a train between Washington and New York that can go150 miles-per-hour but, lacking modern infrastructure, goes that fast for only 18 miles of thetrip; an outdated American energy grid which cant sell energy from one end of the country tothe other; climate change growing more urgent by the day, with 97 percent of scientists tellingus for years of the imperative to act. The solution is staring us in the face: Make energypolicy choices that will allow America to lead a $6 trillion market. Yet still we remain gridlocked;immigration reform urgently needed to unleash the power the full power of millions who livehere and make our laws in doing so both sensible and fair.And on the world stage, you will not escape it even more urgency. We see huge, growingpopulations of young people in places that offer little education, little economic or politicalopportunity. In countries from North Africa to East Asia, you are older than half theirpopulation. Forty percent of their population is younger than Yales next incoming class.If we cant galvanize action to recognize their felt needs if we dont do more to coordinatean attack on extreme poverty, provide education, opportunity, and jobs, we inviteinstability. And I promise you, radical extremism is all too ready to fill the vacuum leftbehind.What should be clear to everyone and its perhaps what makes our current predicament,frankly, so frustrating is that none of our problems are without solutions. None of them. Butneither will they solve themselves. So for all of us, its really a question of willpower, notcapacity. Its a matter of refusing to fall prey to the cynicism and apathy that have alwaysbeen the mortal enemies of progress. And it requires keeping faith with the ability ofinstitutions of America to do big things when the moment demands it. Remember whatNelson Mandela said when confronted by pessimism in the long march to freedom: “It alwaysseems impossible until it is done.”One thing I know for sure these and other felt needs will never be addressed if you, we fallvictim to the slow suffocation of conventional wisdom.On Tuesday I sat in the State Department with some young Foreign Service officers at theState Department, and one of them said something to me that Ive been thinking about,frankly, all week. He wasnt much older than any of you. He said: “Weve gone from an erawhere power lived in hierarchies to an era where power lives in networks and now werewrestling with the fact that those hierarchies are unsettled by the new power.”Every one of you and your parents have mobile devices here today. They represent a lo